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Evolution has done its best, but there's a limit to how many plug-and-play neural implants, supercharged blood cells, strong-as-steel bone replacements and mind-controlled PCs you can expect from randomly colliding natural forces. Wanna be Superman? Better call the engineers.
BY LOGAN WARD Photograph by Mark Hooper Published in the
May,
2006 issue.
Biomedical innovations will likely extend lives. But iconoclastic Cambridge, England-based biogerontologist AUBREY DE GREY goes further. He says the aging process can be virtually halted.
You've said that people walking around today might live to be 1000. How? There are really just seven major categories of age-related damage. One is cell loss without replacement. Another is the opposite--the accumulation of cells you don't want. Three problems have to do with things that go wrong inside cells: mutations in the chromosomes; mutations in the mitochondria; and the accumulation of indigestible molecules in the lysosomes. The final two factors are things that go wrong between our cells: the accumulation of indigestible molecules that get in the way, and the accumulation of chemical bonds that link long-lived proteins together, stiffening elastic tissues such as artery walls. We want to fix all those things.
Okay--but can it be done? Three solutions are already in clinical trials. In the case of the stiffening of elastic structures, like artery walls, it's possible to design drugs that break these cross-links without serious side effects. The drug that's gone furthest seems to break a large proportion of these cross-links--maybe half--including the stiffening that causes hypertension. Another example: Stem cells are being tested as a therapy for cell depletion. The highest-profile clinical trials involve Parkinson's disease--it's fairly straightforward to inject new or precursor cells into the affected area of the brain. Clinical trials have also occurred for heart repair, using precursor cells from skeletal muscles.
Let's say we really do solve one of these seven deadly problems. How much time will that buy people? There's a difference between working on aging and working on a specific age-related disease. Curing one age-related disease might extend life by five or 10 years, but an awful lot of people who would have died from it will die of something else instead. Even if we fix only four or five of these things very well, we probably won't get more than an extra 10 or 20 years of life because the things that we can't fix will still be accumulating. Really, I'm focused on getting all of them working.
It all sounds pretty far-fetched. But, assuming you're right, how long do we have to wait? Depending on funding, it will take another 10 years or so to get to the proof-of-concept stage in the lab. I'd say we have a 50/50 chance getting these therapies all working in humans 15 years after that.
